pop culture

I love it when my vocation and avocation converge as they do in this wonderful comic installment of Wonder Woman from the one and only Pappy’s Golden Age Comic Blogzine.Pappy explains:

This delightfully oddball tale is set in Mexico with a beautiful eight-foot-tall señorita, bandits with bandoleros, Wonder Woman’s invisible plane, chains, bondage, and even Wonder Woman in bare feet walking over hot coals. Wow.

This Mexican melange is drawn by H.G. Peter, and is scanned from Sensation Comics #45 (1945).

An illustrator and lover of classic comics and a curator of artifacts focused on constructions of “Mexicans” in U.S. mass culture, rarely do I chance upon an artifact that blends these worlds (not to mention my not-so-secret fetish for fantastically strong women!)

He just posted a set of scanned 1936-37 covers from pulp fiction magazine Spicy Western Stories and its siblings that all exploit the same stereotype — the leering (ugly) (brown) bandido and the (scantily-clad) (white) chica/victim in distress. Hate much?

The image above is just one slice of the four covers Memo found; the big images of all four are below (click to enlarge):

Today the names Smaug and Thorin Oakenshield will enter American pop culture. Dwarves rambling on a reconquista while Gollum plays riddles will reach a new audience because Peter Jackson filmed the nerd classic, The Hobbit — prequel to Lord of the Rings.

Film has more impact than the written word in today’s society and this version will reach a greater number of people than J.R.R. Tolkien’s book ever will. I am overjoyed that this classic will reach a greater number of gente, but I am filled with sadness that a child’s first encounter with The Hobbit will be in a loud theater instead of a quiet library.

Regardless, I look forward seeing my mental images from the book acted out in the big screen. And remembering the hours reading the book, which played a monumental role in my becoming Eres Nerd. [Mas…]

(PNS reporting from BURBANK) Now that an embarrassed Disney has explained that the animated character Princess Sofia the First is NOT a Latina princess, the studio was quick to announce that a real Latina princess is in the works, this time for a feature-length film.

Princess Malinche will be the heroine of Disney’s next animated film, due for release in the summer of 2014, according to a statement issued today.

The tentative cast already includes Catherine Zeta Jones as the voice of Malinche, Justin Bieber as Cortés and Paul Rodriguez as Fray Xicken.

The story of Malinche follows her idyllic upbringing in the then-Aztec empire in what is now Mexico during the early 1500s to her whirlwind romance with Spaniard Hernán Cortés, and finally to the epic drowning of her own children in the river. [Mas…]

“Guess people aren’t as wild about genocide as we had hoped,” a Gap insider told PNS, “which is a damn shame.We had some great designs planned which we felt would appeal to the coveted ‘racist hipster douche’ demographic currently locked up by Urban Outfitters.”

It’s Hispanic Heritage Month. Break out a novelty sombrero and a bottle of Patron, because like a taco smothered in salsa, heritage is waay more palpable when it’s smothered in consumerism…

I often encounter people who don’t understand why I identify as Hispanic. I’ve given it a lot of thought and I think it comes down to this: they’re eating the shit sandwich.

The shit sandwich is served-up fresh daily by consumerism. Let’s process culture, strip it of all that gunk we don’t need (like knowledge and power), and behold — now you can buy a poncho at Urban Outfitters. Culture itself has no value outside the bounds of consumption.

The shortage of Mexican-American shows and role models on television is an ongoing issue, but Luke Torres has a solution: Here’s the story, of a man named Sanchez, who was living with six kids in a car. All of them were selling fruit like their father…